How often do you reinstall your OS? In practice never, I installed Arch around 8 years ago on one computer and that’s the install I have today still. I copied it twice to a bigger SSD but that’s kind of it.
There is a certain thrill when you nuke your disk to install a distro you never tried before. I actually just nuke one of my laptop last night to try void linux.
Yeah, I don’t think that’s the best selling point for desktop use. For me it’s having all my configs for all my devices in a single place, checked in git, with bits of config I can easily share between my different devices.
Easy install is not the only benefit. You also get fearless upgrades. When I upgrade my Nvidia driver and it inevitably exposes bugs in one of my apps, I can always jump back to the previous build version without uninstalling anything.
I didn’t reinstall my OS because I wanted to. Ubuntu messed up the upgrade from 20 LTS to 22 LTS. There was some message in the console, but an hour later I forgot about it and shut off the computer without checking the message again
When it came back it was a terminal and I had no working WiFi. I googled how to do WiFi on Ubuntu from the terminal, but the answers all told me about the previous WiFi on Ubuntu and I didn’t even have that daemon
Eventually I wiped the drive and installed NixOS because it backs up your previous configs. When an upgrade fails you just undo and go to the previous working version.
Every few months or so? There is always that one distro that sounds cool and maybe it’s better than what you are using atm.
Yeah, sure. It’s mostly a waste of time and I keep coming back to Arch after a few days, but without this drive I would not have ever tried Arch in the first place. So because of this I found my favorite distro, but I can also never be 100% sure it’s the best distro. Pros and cons, I guess.
How often do you reinstall your OS? In practice never, I installed Arch around 8 years ago on one computer and that’s the install I have today still. I copied it twice to a bigger SSD but that’s kind of it.
There is a certain thrill when you nuke your disk to install a distro you never tried before. I actually just nuke one of my laptop last night to try void linux.
I was wondering if Void was still popular. It was kind of feeling like NixOS took all its hype
I’m reporting you to the Ubuntu police!
Yeah, I don’t think that’s the best selling point for desktop use. For me it’s having all my configs for all my devices in a single place, checked in git, with bits of config I can easily share between my different devices.
Easy install is not the only benefit. You also get fearless upgrades. When I upgrade my Nvidia driver and it inevitably exposes bugs in one of my apps, I can always jump back to the previous build version without uninstalling anything.
Hey, man. Some of us just suck at everything but reinstalling.
You clearly don’t have a software hoarding problem
Could I maintain the same OS install for the life of a device? Sure. Can I resist disro hopping? Nope!
I made it, I think, 3 years on a Fedora install once.
I didn’t reinstall my OS because I wanted to. Ubuntu messed up the upgrade from 20 LTS to 22 LTS. There was some message in the console, but an hour later I forgot about it and shut off the computer without checking the message again
When it came back it was a terminal and I had no working WiFi. I googled how to do WiFi on Ubuntu from the terminal, but the answers all told me about the previous WiFi on Ubuntu and I didn’t even have that daemon
Eventually I wiped the drive and installed NixOS because it backs up your previous configs. When an upgrade fails you just undo and go to the previous working version.
Every few months or so? There is always that one distro that sounds cool and maybe it’s better than what you are using atm. Yeah, sure. It’s mostly a waste of time and I keep coming back to Arch after a few days, but without this drive I would not have ever tried Arch in the first place. So because of this I found my favorite distro, but I can also never be 100% sure it’s the best distro. Pros and cons, I guess.
No distros are cool. Computers are tools. Is one distro actively better at completing jobs you need to do? There the one you need.